Education on the Internet
Number 75: 18th June, 2003
Introduction
Introduction
Education on the Internet is published by Spartacus Educational every week. The newsletter includes news, reviews of websites and articles on using ICT in the classroom. Members of the mailing list are invited to submit information for inclusion in future newsletters. In this way we hope to create a community of people involved in using the Internet in education. Currently there are 36,000 subscribers to the newsletter.
All reviews are added to our web directory. There are sections on Internet Services, Online Seminars, Primary Education, English, Mathematics, Science, Modern Languages, History, Geography, Design & Technology, Business Studies, Special Needs, Media Studies, ICT, Sociology, Music, Politics, Economics, Photography, Art & Design, Theatre Studies, Physical Education and Religious Studies.
John Simkin
Online Seminars
Teachers or Facilitators: Dafydd Humphreys speculates that "if our esteemed rulers are right - perhaps you don’t need teachers in the classroom - maybe teaching assistants (TAs) could supervise the kids while one teacher per cluster of schools wrote lesson plans and marked work?" He adds: "Those of us left in the education sector could be facilitators - allowing students to follow their own learning pathways along the ready-prepared and prescribed National Curricula (with little tick-boxes for numeracy, literacy, science, ICT, citizenship, personal, social, health and moral education encountered in each lesson). We facilitators would write individual lesson plans for each of the children in the teaching groups, based on computerised tests taken when they were 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 years old." If you have views on this subject, register with the History Forum and join the debate.
Edutopia Online: The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) is a nonprofit operating foundation that documents and disseminates models of the most innovative practices in the classroom. Edutopia Online Video Gallery is an archive of short documentaries and expert interviews that allows visitors to visualize what these innovations look like - in the classroom and in the words of teachers and students. Detailed articles, research summaries, and links to hundreds of relevant Web sites, books, organizations, and publications are also available to help schools and communities build on successes in education.
Schoolfriend: This website claims it is the first, web-based, interactive bespoke learning course for children aged between 4-13. It costs 99p per week and already has 30,000 subscribers. Schoolfriend's founder, Amanda Argent, argues that it is providing children with seamless, individualised learning at school and at home. Concentrating on Maths, Spelling and Vocabulary, with 7 more subjects coming online shortly, Schoolfriend helps children learn at their own pace.
Omnilearn: File-sharing programs allow users to access and share other people's files. Omnilearn is a similar concept, but applied to online assessment of students within the National Curriculum. Users of Omnilearn can custom build multiple-choice tests within minutes using either your own questions or those of other teachers that are using the Omnilearn resource. Once you've added a question to Omnilearn, it is available for everyone to access. When a question is used in a test, this is logged, this means that the most popular (and hopefully best written) questions will be elevated to the top of the pile and thus a natural selection will take place. Other features allow you to view only questions written by a certain user, rank the questions by date or only view your own questions when selecting for a quiz.
History
Atlas of the Valley of the Kings: Discover each tomb in the Valley in this interactive Atlas. Investigate a database of information about each tomb, view a compilation of more than 2000 images, interact with models of each tomb, and measure, pan, and zoom over 250 detailed maps, elevations, and sections. Experience sixty-five narrated tours by Dr. Weeks and explore a 3D recreation of tomb KV 14. The website also enables you to explore the Theban Necropolis through a giant aerial photograph. You can zoom in to see individual architectural details of temples and palaces as well as the topography of the area.
ActiveHistory: Russell Tarr is one of Britain's leading figures in the area of online learning. These articles originally appeared in the Times Educational Supplement and the History Review and have now been made available via his ActiveHistory website. This includes Playing Devil's Advocate, Decision Making Games in the History Classroom, Work with the Web, Straight from the Sources' Mouth, The Past in Pictures, The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Wolsey, The Radical Reformers and The Italian Wars (1494-1516).
Music
Beauville Arts: This performing arts company runs international Summer Schools for 8-18 year olds in South West France. Bringing together numerous nationalities from a broad academic background - schools across Europe, international schools, home-schoolers etc. students keep in touch via the site's 'Beauville Reunited' webpage. Founder, Jonathan Mallalieu, former Director of Performing Arts at the International School of Toulouse, also provides INSET training in Music Technology for teachers. During the academic year the company welcomes school groups for tailor-made educational and recreational courses. These range from rehearsing and producing musical shows within the week, to choir/orchestral tours and welcoming exam classes to complete and record to CD compositional course work in the company's recording studio. Summer school dates for 2003: 12th - 19th July: West Side Story, 19th - 26th July: James Bond 007. For further information contact: claire.mallalieu@wanadoo.fr
Piano on the Net: This excellent educational site is a free public service brought to you by PianoNanny.com and The Nanny Group. Your instructor for the course is film composer and jazz musician, Clinton Clark. Each lesson takes about 35 minutes to complete. However, work slowly and at your own pace. It's important to learn each lesson before moving on to the next. Beginning with Lesson Number 5, this course uses audio, with the Apple QuickTime(TM) plugin, and 4.0 browser enhancements including JavaScript. Some of the classroom accessories, such as the 12 note keyboard companion, require FLASH 5.0.
Religious Studies
Jewish Virtual Library: The Jewish Virtual Library is the world's most comprehensive Jewish cyber encyclopedia with more than 8,000 entries covering everything from anti-Semitism to Zionism. The Library has 13 wings: History, Women, The Holocaust, Travel, Israel & The States, Maps, Politics, Biography, Israel, Religion, Judaic Treasures of the Library of Congress, Vital Statistics and Reference. The Reference section has bibliographies of more than 1,000 books and 1,000 web sites, and a glossary of more than 1,000 words and a time-line for the history of Judaism.
Beyond the Pale: The Jewish people descend from nomadic tribes in the Middle East. In the Russian Empire the presence of Jews was not tolerated since the Middle Ages. Jews were considered the enemy of Christ by Orthodox Christianity and believed to aim at converting Christians to Judaism. The Czars, in their role as Protectors of the Faith, regularly refused permission even for Jewish merchants to enter Russia. This website provides a detailed account of the history of the Jews in Russia.
Economics
Commanding Heights: This site offers a comprehensive overview of global economic history from the beginning of the First World War. Along with a six-hour video narrative divided into short chapters, it includes extensive interviews, essays, charts, reports, an interactive atlas of history, and economic data related to the topics of globalization, economic development, and international trade. The purpose of this PBS site is to promote better understanding of globalization, world trade and economic development, including the forces, values, events and ideas that have shaped the present global economic system.
Friends and Fortunes: In this economic simulation you compete with four experts. Each of you wants to build a successful business empire. The game consists of 12 stages. Players make decisions according to the rules for each stage. Rules for each stage are simple and are given during the game. During play it is useful to collect as many companies as possible. Each company increases a player's strength during the stage Partnerships and Power. After the final stage players tally their wealth: cash, plus companies, plus deeds, minus any loans.
Internet Services
Movable Type is powerful, customizable publishing system which installs on web servers to enable individuals or organizations to manage and update weblogs, journals, and frequently-updated website content. Movable Type is widely recognized as the premiere choice for power users of weblogs, as well as organizations interested in nanopublishing, intranet knowledge management, and marketing or communications through weblogs. Movable Type's architecture is extremely flexible, allowing it to run on any major web server platform and to work with most common databases. In addition, its customizable code and the extensive library of third-party applications which extend and interface with the system mean that Movable Type can accommodate almost any custom requirement.
Microsoft Update: A number of security issues have been identified in Microsoft® Internet Explorer that could allow an attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows®-based systems and then take a variety of actions. For example, an attacker could run programs on a computer used to view the attacker's Web site. This vulnerability affects computers that have Microsoft® Internet Explorer installed. (You do not have to be using Internet Explorer as your Web browser to be affected by this issue.)
Book Section
History, ICT and Learning in the Secondary School: Despite the high profile of ICT in education, finding practical and meaningful ways to integrate ICT with lessons can be a difficult and overwhelming task. This book explores the current use and the potential of ICT in the secondary history curriculum, and offers sound theory and practical advice to help secondary history teachers use ICT effectively. With contributions from leading academics and practitioners in history education, this book will be important reading for all secondary history teachers and trainee teachers, and will also be of interest to upper primary school teachers. Terry Haydn is a senior lecturer in education at the University of East Anglia. Christine Counsell is a lecturer in education at the University of Cambridge.(Edited by Terry Haydn and Christine Counsell, Routledge Falmer, ISBN 0 415 26349 2, £15.99)
